Chapter 8
Kael
Forgiveness, it turns out, is daily.
Nobody told me that. I had thought — for seventeen years I had thought — that forgiveness was a kind of door you walked through, a single threshold that you either crossed or did not cross, and the side you ended up on determined the rest of your life.
I had assumed Callum would either forgive me or not, and the verdict would come down within a week of him knowing, and I would adjust my life to the verdict and that would be that.
It is not that.
It is dailiness. It is the way he comes to the table for breakfast on the fourth day after he learns and does not speak to me but does not leave when I sit down.
It is the way he passes me the salt on the seventh day without being asked.
It is the way, on the ninth day, when I am loading wood into the back of the truck, he comes out of the cabin in his coat without a word and helps me.
He does not look at me. He does not speak to me.
He loads wood beside me for an hour and then he goes inside and washes his hands and asks Della when supper is.
It is dailiness like that.
I let him set the pace. I do not greet him first. I do not ask him questions.
I let him decide what he wants from me at any given hour and I am — I am the man who waits, I am the patient version of myself I have been my whole life, and what I am discovering is that this version of myself, applied to a seventeen-year-old who has just learned his uncle killed his father, is exactly the right tool for the job.
I am a collector. A collector waits. I have spent twenty years waiting for debtors to come around and now I am applying the same skill to a different problem and it works, it works the same way, the patience is the same patience.
But this is not a debt I am collecting.
That is the difference.
I am not — I do not want anything from him.
I am not waiting for him to pay me back for the seventeen years I lost. I am not keeping a tally.
I am, for the first time in my life, sitting in a position that looks like collection and is not collection, and the wolf in me is having to learn the difference.
The wolf in me has, his whole life, been a collector's wolf.
He has tracked. He has chased. He has cornered.
He is learning now to sit — to actually sit — with no destination, with no payment owed at the end of the sitting, and the strangeness of it is the strangeness of a working dog being asked to be a house dog.
He keeps looking at me like, is this it. Is this all we're doing.
It is.
That is all we are doing.
On the twentieth day Callum speaks to me.
It is morning. I am at the kitchen table with coffee. He comes in. He gets a mug. He pours coffee. He stands at the counter with the mug for a beat and he says, without turning around:
"Can you show me the grave."
I freeze.
I had — I had been waiting for the question. I had not been waiting for it on a Tuesday morning over coffee, in his bare feet, in a sweatshirt of mine he has been wearing for a week. I set down my mug. I say, "Yes."
He says, "When."
"Whenever you want."
"Today."
"Okay."
"After breakfast."
"Okay."
He drinks his coffee. He does not say another word.
He sits down across the table from me — across, not next to, but across, which is closer than he has sat to me at breakfast in two weeks — and he eats the eggs Willa puts in front of him and he does not look at me and he does not look away from me either.
He simply eats. He simply exists across the table.
After breakfast we drive.
I drive the truck up the access trail. He sits in the passenger seat.
He does not turn the radio on. He looks out the window.
The early March light is thin and the bare oaks are starting to bud at the tips and the snow is patchy on the ground, blue in the shadows and gone in the sun.
I park at the dead end. We walk up the half-mile through the trees and I do not speak and he does not speak.
I show him the stones.
He stops at the edge of the clearing. He looks at them for a long time. He does not move closer.
He says, "Here."
"Here."
He looks at me.
He says, "Show me where you were standing."
I show him. I walk to the spot, about six feet east of the stones. I stand where I stood that morning. I put my hands at my sides the way they were that morning. I look at the empty space where my brother was standing and I show my brother's son what I looked like at the moment.
Callum walks to where his father was.
He stands there. He is the height his father was.
He has the build his father had. He is younger by twenty-two years and he is in a different coat but he is standing where Ronan stood, looking back at me where I stood, and the geometry is wrong, the geometry is so wrong, and I have to hold still because the wolf in me wants to come up out of my chest and lie down at the boy's feet.
Callum says, "And he just — he turned around."
"Yes."
"And he said — what did he say. Again."
I tell him again.
I tell him the exact words. I have not forgotten them. I will never forget them.
Callum stands there and listens.
When I am done he says, "Did he look at you."
"Yes."
"What did his face look like."
I think.
I say, "He looked — kid, he looked at peace.
He was — he was scared, I think, underneath.
But on the surface he was — he had made his peace with it.
He had decided. He was — he was looking at me like he was sorry he had put me in the position.
He was looking at me like a man who loved his brother and wished he had not handed his brother this thing to carry. "
Callum nods.
He stands there for a long minute.
Then he walks over to the stones. He kneels down.
He puts his hand flat on the granite slab — the big one, the one I dragged up here on my back — and he closes his eyes and he kneels there for a long time.
He does not say anything out loud. I do not know what he says in his head.
I do not need to know. I stand six feet east, where I was, and I let him have his time.
He gets up.
He walks back to me. He stops in front of me. He looks at me.
He says, "Thank you for showing me."
I say, "You're welcome."
He says, "I — I don't know what I am with you yet. I don't know what to call you. I called you uncle for a while and then I stopped because I didn't know if I had the right and I'm — I'm asking. What am I supposed to call you."
I take a breath.
I say, "You can call me whatever you want, kid.
Uncle, if you can stand to. Kael, if uncle is too much.
By no name at all, if that's easier. There is no rule.
There is no — there is no right answer. I am the man across the table for however long you want me to be that and I will answer to whatever you call me. "
He thinks about this.
He says, "Uncle."
He says it like he is testing it. He says it like a man tries a name in his mouth before he commits to it.
"Uncle," he says again. "Okay. Uncle."
I do not — I do not let it show on my face. The wolf in me sits down hard.
We walk back to the truck. He does not speak on the drive home.
He goes into the cabin and goes to his room and shuts the door and stays in there for the rest of the afternoon.
I sit at the kitchen table. Willa, who has been pretending not to wait, comes in and pours me coffee and sits down across from me and looks at me.
I say, "He called me uncle."
She closes her eyes.
She does not say anything for a long minute. She just sits with her eyes closed and breathes.
She says, "Kael."
"Yeah."
"It's going to be okay."
"It's going to be okay."
"Not today. Not next week. But it's going to be okay."
"Yeah," I say. "I think it is."
The storm comes at the end of March.
We do not see it coming. The forecast is for snow — moderate, nothing alarming — and by midafternoon the snow is heavy and by evening it is sideways and by nine o'clock it is the kind of storm where the wind sounds like it is trying to get into the cabin and the temperature has dropped twenty degrees in three hours and the power has gone out, on the eastern half of the compound, and is not coming back on tonight.
Callum is at the clubhouse.
He went there before the storm got bad, with the younger wolves, for the weekly pack supper.
He is staying there for the night. Della has texted me to say that the clubhouse is on the western grid which still has power and that Conrad has put down all the boys on the cots in the upstairs room and that Callum is asleep and warm and accounted for, and I am not to worry, and not to send Willa across the compound in this weather to check.
I am at my cabin.
My cabin is on the eastern grid.
So is Willa's.
Willa's cabin has a woodstove. So does mine.
But mine has a better stove — newer, more efficient, with a built-in cooktop — and Willa has come over here with her overnight bag and a flashlight at eight thirty in the evening, in the storm, because she said her cabin was too cold and she did not want to make Della come stay with her and she did not want to be alone.
She did not say I want to be with you. She did not have to.
She has been here for two hours.
We have eaten supper. We have done dishes.
The storm is loud against the windows. The fire is good in the stove.
The only light in the cabin is from the stove and from one lamp I have lit and put on the table, and the lamp is going to run out of oil in about two hours and then it will just be firelight.
She is on the couch.
I am on the chair across from her.
We have been talking — about the storm, about Callum, about the dailiness — for an hour.
The conversation has, gradually, gone quiet.
The way conversations between us go quiet now.
Not the silence of nothing to say. The silence of both of us thinking about the same thing at the same time and not yet ready to admit it.